With so much recycling of the Eighties going on – Stranger Things, Ready Player One, the Go-Gos musical on Broadway, Murphy Brown, She-Ra, I Want My All ATX, to scrape just the tip of the iceberg – we sure could use a look at the real deal. Well, one's coming in a book of images by Austin photographer Bill Leissner.

Not everybody’s going to conjure up a powerful classic like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Not everybody’s going to render an intense work like Debbie Drechsler’s Daddy’s Girl. Like Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You. Like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Like Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning. Like –

It’s absurd that no one has done a book of this kind before now.
That’s the opening line of the introduction by editors Tara Madison Avery and Jeanne Thornton, the opening line of the introduction to We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, and of course it’s absolutely true.

With his long-running comics series Berlin recently collected in hardcover, Jason Lutes is now able to talk about the 18-year history of creating this masterwork. And the Texas Book Festival has wisely invited Lutes to do just that at the 2018 fest (details below). Our interview with Lutes can be found here. Now, here's a review of his novel.

Before Dexter Gordon died in 1990, he asked his wife to finish a book he'd started about his life. She agreed, and this fall, Maxine Gordon is releasing the result. Since she's in Austin this week to host a screening of Round Midnight, for which Dexter Gordon received an Oscar nomination, it's an ideal time to review the new volume.

City of stones. City of smoke. City of light. The city is Berlin. The time is the late 1920s. The situation – let’s call it that, as if to reduce its terrible power in memory – the situation is the rise of National Socialism at the end of Germany’s Weimar Republic.Yeah, National Socialism. You know: Nazis.

Local author Sherry Thomas had genre-hopped before, having built a following with a blend of YA fantasy (the Elementals trilogy), Victorian romance (the Fitzhugh series), and homages to the Chinese martial art adventure genre wuxia (The Heart of Blade duology). But taking on a cultural icon as revered as Sherlock Holmes?

The paragon of Victorian womanhood may have been demure and delicate, but there are no shrinking violets in the third novel of Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series. The Hollow of Fear’s charm and tension come from Thomas’ dexterous use of a classic trope: A good guy is being framed, and our heroine’s racing the clock to find the real killer.